Rural Transformations; Renewable energy; Innovative Networks; Gender and Youth; Department of Land Economy; Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS); Centre of Development Studies; School of Humanities and Social Sciences

Dr Shailaja Fennell is University Lecturer in Development Studies at the Department of Land Economy, located at the Centre of Development Studies in POLIS. She is a Fellow of Jesus College, a member of the Energy @ Cambridge Strategic Research Initiative, and also the Director of Research at Cambridge Central Asia Forum, which bridges the sciences, social sciences and humanities to build academic collaborations between Cambridge and institutions in Central Asia.

Shailaja’s research interests include institutional reform and implications for national and local decision making; rural development and agricultural sustainability and role of innovative technologies; youth migration, skill formation and employment aspirations; gender, kinship and ethnicity; comparative economic development and provision of public goods, with a particular focus on partnerships.

Shailaja's engagement with the Sustainable Development Goals through the participation in the Global Challenges Forum comes out of her early experiences of the relationship between institutional exclusion and inequality in India, which led her to work with environment groups and democratic rights organisations as a student. Early influences were the work of Rachel Carson, and Barry Commoner, and she finds academic motivation from the writings ofElinor Ostrom.

The Global Challenges Initiative is a Strategic Research Initiative of the University of Cambridge that aims to enhance the contribution of its research towards addressing global challenges and achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030.

This Site Uses Cookies

We may use cookies to record some preference settings and to analyse how
you use our web site. We may also use external analysis systems which may
set additional cookies to perform their analysis.These cookies (and any
others in use) are detailed in our site privacy and cookie policies and are
integral to our web site. You can delete or disable these cookies in your
web browser if you wish but then our site may not work correctly.